Paul’s alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began,” read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with “‘civil rights,’ quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.” It also denounced “the media” for believing that “America’s number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks.” To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were “the only people to act like real Americans,” it explained, “mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.”

And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s much more:

This “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism” was hardly the first time one of Paul’s publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled “What To Expect for the 1990s,” predicted that “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.'” Two months later, a newsletter warned of “The Coming Race War,” and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” “This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,” the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author–presumably Paul–wrote, “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.”

There’s a lot of things that you would expect to see in a newsletter for any white supremacist group such as kind words for David Duke, an outlash against Martin Luther King Day and anti-gay rhetoric.

Of course, the first question that pops into mind is did Ron Paul actually write these article and if not why did they appear in his newsletters?

When I asked Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign spokesman, about the newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted “various levels of approval” to what appeared in his publications–ranging from “no approval” to instances where he “actually wrote it himself.” After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, “A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no.” He added that he was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther King, because “Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero.”

In other words, Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naÃ¯ve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.

â€œThe quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

â€œIn fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: â€˜I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.â€™

â€œThis story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

â€œWhen I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.â€

Honestly, if it had been one or two articles written in his newsletter by a misguided staff writer the “golly gee I didn’t know” defense would be more believable but clearly it was a trend. The ReVolution will no longer be televised.

“Take this copy of the Bible.”
“What bible, this is just a blank piece of paper.”
“Yeah, that’s the nonfiction version.”

“It is true in another sense, in what we call the biblical sense. In other words it’s fantastically improbable and impossible to verify so naturally I intend to live my life henceforth in strict accordance to it to the detriment of everyone around me.”

And much like Bertrand Russell writing Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy during a stint in jail, this guy was inspired to turn his head into a football helmet while incarcerated.

Thompson, 39, a longtime Laconia resident, wanted to pay homage to the team’s recent completion of a perfect season and Sunday’s victory against the New York Giants prompted him to turn his shaved skull into the canvas with which to voice his appreciation for their dominance.

On Monday Thompson made his way from his Winter Street apartment around the corner to House of Tattoos to get a full sized Patriots emblem permanently emblazoned on the side of his head.

The inking process took about one and a half hours and is part of an overall goal that has Thompson set on turning his entire head into a replica of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s helmet.

He has plans to get an identical emblem on the other side of his head and Brady’s number 12 on the back of his skull.

Thompson isn’t shy about the fact that he got the idea to turn his head into a helmet while serving time in prison where he watched all of their games in past seasons.

Nippon Television’s (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn’t have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn’t have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn’t have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

It all started one snowy day in January, 1998 with an audition. The audition consisted of choosing lots because the only talent needed for this challenge was luck. A group of aspiring comedians showed up, and among them was a young man whose stage name is Nasubi, which means eggplant. Nasubi was ‘lucky’ that day, and was chosen over other aspiring young comedians for a mysterious “show-business related job”. He was immediately blindfolded and driven to a tiny one room apartment somewhere in Tokyo.

When he arrived at the apartment, he was shown a stand full of magazines, a huge pile of postcards, and told to strip naked. The room was empty except for a cushion, a table, a small radio, a telephone, some notebooks, and a few pens. There was not a crumb of food, a square of toilet paper, or any form of entertainment. Whatever he needed, he was to win by sending thousands of postcards into contests. The producers left and Nasubi was on his own in his unique survival challenge. Imagine what was going through his mind: How am I going to eat? Why are they doing this to me? How long will it take to get out of here? He must have thought he was in a bad episode of The Prisoner.

Nasubi won his first contest on February 8th. He got some jelly, a 1560 yen value, leaving him with 998 440 yen left to win. That day, he ate food for the first time in two weeks! On February 22nd, he won a 5 kg bag of rice. Unfortunately, he had no cooking utensils. At first he tried eating it raw, but eventually devised a cooking method where he put it in an empty can beside a burner for an hour until it was “cooked”. He ate about a half cup of rice a day using two pens for chopsticks.